Hillary clinton

Eleven months on from foisting her second grabby megalomaniac on the United States, Hillary Clinton has resurfaced. Not to apologise for losing the presidency to an angry hairpiece who mimicked the disabled for laughs at campaign rallies -- no, Clinton has a book to spruik. What Happened is published by Simon & Schuster and will be on the shelves from Tuesday. Clinton appeared on CBS Sunday Morning to promote what, if the trails are to be believed, will be a standard Clinton exercise in self-justification and blame-shifting. It takes a village to take the fall. She will blast primary opponent Bernie Sanders for enabling Donald Trump's 'Crooked Hillary' meme and get snippy with Joe Biden over her campaign's middle-class bona fides.

Political scandals sometimes throw up deliciously eccentric minor characters. Trump-Russia — a scandal or merely a crisis, according to taste — now has one: Rob Goldstone. He is described as a British former tabloid journalist, a music promoter, former Miss Universe pageant judge, and friend of the Trumps. Facebook videos reveal a short, tubby man with a northern accent and voice that seems a couple of octaves too high for his bulk. Twitter photos show him in a black shirt with a shiny gold tie; or holding velvet loafers up to his double chin, the word ‘Sex!’ embroidered on the toecaps; or wearing a gold baseball hat bearing the legend ‘CUNTY’. (Urban Dictionary: ‘Cunty, adj, conceited, cocky, acting like a bitch on the rag.

 New York As the malevolence and incoherence of the Trump administration continue to amaze, Democrats are taking heart from the popular revulsion against the Mad Hatter of Mar-a-Lago. The media class is chattering excitedly about anti-Trump momentum after special Congress elections in conservative Kansas and Georgia resulted in a narrow Republican victory in the former and a run-off in the latter. Last week, Paul Kane of the Washington Post cited this as proof ‘that Democrats have galvanised the anti-Trump activism of the past three months into votes at the ballot box’.

Why aren't feminists lining up behind Le Pen? I thought women had a moral responsibility to back women standing for office? That's certainly what they said during the Hillary-Trump clash. Yes, I am voting for Hillary because she's a woman, because she ‘knows what it's like to menstruate, be pregnant, give birth’, said one American feminist. So does Le Pen. She has three children. According to the rather crude biologism of feminist identitarianism, that makes her an even better candidate than Hillary, who has one kid. So why the silence, feminists? Aren't you ‘With Her’? Looking back at the Hillary love-in, its remarkable how much it hinged on 'Hillary's a woman'.

There were three reasons why I so badly wanted Donald Trump to win the US presidential election. One was that the alternative was Hillary; another that I knew it would annoy all the worst people in the world; but the third was a positive one: I genuinely believed that as an independently wealthy, outsider candidate with no loyalties to the DC establishment, Trump was going to be the revolutionary hero who would finally free the people from the shackles of a corrupt, sclerotic and self-serving ruling elite. Some may scoff at my naivety. But there was evidence to support my view. Brexit had just happened and what seemed clear from Trump’s embrace of Nigel Farage was that he saw himself as part of the same populist wave.

I don’t like Donald Trump. I think his executive order barring travel from certain countries is rash and illiberal. And yet I cannot get behind the hyperbolic, Holocaust-citing protests against him. I cannot line up with the idea that he’s a uniquely bad president, possibly the worst ever; that he’s an ‘aberration’, ‘abnormal’, someone we must never ‘normalise’. I can’t do that for the simple reason that treating Trump as abnormal implicitly normalises that which preceded him. It whitewashes history. It forgives, or dilutes, the crimes of past politicians. The idea that Trump is different — scarily, historically different — is everywhere.

It’s a mistake to think of Donald Trump as a protectionist, as Boris Johnson will have discovered during his recent visit to New York. Theresa May has said that some protectionist instincts are starting to creep in and that the UK should be a champion of free trade. Her remarks are widely interpreted as a reference to policies planned by Donald Trump, but his plans can just as easily be seen as a defence of a rules-based international trading system. One of the 28 pledges made in his Contract with the American Voter was to 'identify all foreign trading abuses that unfairly impact American workers' and to use 'every tool under American and international law to end those abuses immediately'.

The 'Women’s March' on Washington might not have actually happened yet but it can already be judged a success. Few demonstrations in recent years have attracted such advance publicity, inspired so many supportive column inches, or prompted such an abundance of ‘how to’ guides for the novice protester. The march, planned for 21 January - the day after Trump’s inauguration - and now scheduled to take place across a further thirty American cities as well as in London, Sydney and Zurich, has clearly captured the imagination of those determined to signal their distaste for the incoming administration. More than 200,000 people are expected to participate in Washington alone with trains and hotel rooms now reportedly fully booked.

We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 1: Emily Hill's interview with Camille Paglia, in which the iconoclastic professor labels Hillary Clinton a 'disaster' Talking to Camille Paglia is like approaching a machine gun: madness to stick your head up and ask a question, unless you want your brain blown apart by the answer, but a visceral delight to watch as she obliterates every subject in sight. Most of the time she does this for kicks. It’s only on turning to Hillary Clinton that she perpetrates an actual murder: of Clinton II’s most cherished claim, that her becoming 45th president of the United States would represent a feminist triumph.

We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 2: Brendan O'Neill's blog post in which he argues that the response to Trump's victory in the US election reveals exactly why 'The Donald' won in the first place If you want to know why Trump won, just look at the response to his winning. The lofty contempt for ‘low information’ Americans. The barely concealed disgust for the rednecks and cretins of ‘flyover’ America who are apparently racist and misogynistic and homophobic. The haughty sneering at the vulgar, moneyed American political system and how it has allowed a wealthy candidate to poison the little people’s mushy, malleable minds.